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Updated: May 13, 2025
"Why should we, when you know more about this place than we do?" "What do yo' mean by that?" he flashed out at her, his sullen face suddenly dark. "Why why " Ricky faltered, "Charity Biglow said that you knew all about the swamp " His tense position relaxed a fraction. "Oh, yo' know Miss Charity?" "Yes. She showed us the picture she is painting, the one you are posing for," Ricky went on.
This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it is the language of the Biglow Papers. Uttered with the accent of a Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen of "Mr. Dooley."
During the evenings of 1892, Carleton guided a Reading Club of young ladies who met at his house. I remember, one evening, with what effect he read Lowell's "Biglow Papers," his eyes twinkling with the fun which none enjoyed more than he.
A few days afterwards I received from him the well-known preface to the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, cut out from the volume. It was a graceful concession to Southern weakness, and after all I may have been mistaken in thinking that I could read the Second Series as literature, just as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two-penny Post Bag.
Ricky touched the strip of covering across the canvas on the easel. "May I?" she asked. "Yes. It might be a help, getting some other person's reaction to the thing. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do when I started but I don't think it's turning out to be what I planned." Ricky lifted off the cover. Val stared at the canvas. "But that is he!" he exclaimed. Charity Biglow turned to the boy.
It was, in fact, a dramatic rendering of them of the highest order. I remember with equal vividness hearing Lowell read some of his Biglow Papers in the drawing-room of my valued friend Arthur Dexter, of Boston, when there were no others present save him and his mother and my wife and myself.
That the habits of our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very awkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true.
Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series of "Biglow Papers," he had a theme and a method precisely suited to his temperament.
In June, 1846, the editor of the Boston Courier, a weekly paper well known in the "Hub" for its literary character even to this day, received a strange communication. It was a letter signed "Ezekiel Biglow," enclosing a poem written by his son Hosea. This is the way the letter began: Jaylem, June, 1846.
To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours."
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